As for the rest of the cast, it'd be nice if Sideswipe, Ratchet, Dino and the Wreckers were in it if only to be killed off but I'm not holding my breath after Bay resisted the cheap kudos of killing off Skidz and Mudflap on-screen. I'd prefer closure to another batch of disappearances certainly, and it'd add a bit more to the hunted angle than some new guy getting it.

Based on the trailers I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a lot of the previous films' spearcarriers might have been killed off between DOTM and AoE as part of the "hunting Transformers" angle.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cliffjumper

And I don't think the franchise would really work as anything other than an action film. It drives me mad when you see people say "oh, it should be like this comic series or computer game where it's just Transformers on Cybertron with no humans", whereas to me the wonder of the live action stuff is the Transformers interacting with the real world seamlessly - Lennox hammering on Ironhide's bonnet, Blackout knocking the shit out of a SOCCENT base, Dino skidding down a freeway.

Yeah, the TF films might rely too heavily on explosions and generic action movie tropes, but the way to improve them is not by aping something that was successful in a totally different medium (also the TF games I've played are no better than the worst of the movies, so there's that going against the idea as well). Do that and you'll end up with something that's just as bad as ROTF, because what's fun on a comic page would be dreadfully boring in screen (and vice versa usually).

And I agree that a big top selling point is just how real the Transformers look on screen and how well they interact with the human cast and the background. Most of the time they don't look like CGI that's been inserted after the fact, they look like Bay actually built a bunch of giant robots and started filming them. There are a lot of things I'd change about the movies if I could, but this is one thing they got absolutely spot on.